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The Drifter was the result of a discussion between Ken Boyko, Don Emde, son of Indian legend Floyd Emde and John Hoover of Kawasaki. Retro motorcycles were becoming the rage and the question was posed “What would a modern up-to-date Indian look like and what kind of technology would it have?“ They had Vincent Renaldi do a drawing and enlisted Denny Berg of Time Machines Inc. to build such a machine. They gave him a 1500cc Vulcan motor and the drawing and turned him loose. The final result was a motorcycle called the “Super Chief“, which was taken to several shows in 1996/97 and was such a hit with the riding public that Kawasaki took the Super Chief to Japan and put it into production. Due to patent law they couldn't use the Chief moniker and up until its release the name had not been settled on. The Drifters are intended to be a “tribute“ to the 1948 Indian Chief and so closely resembles the Indian Chief of the late 1940s that the uninitiated mistake it for an “old“ Indian. The Super Chief was featured in several motorcycle magazines. An article in Rider magazine quoted the creators as saying that “the object of the exercise had been to marry classic Indian styling with contemporary technology in order to create a motorcycle which one might have expected Indian to manufacture had it still been in existence at the time the project was launched.
